Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano has published a column professing his shock that the mass shooter at a school in Uvalde, Texas, was Latino instead of a white supremacist, as he had presumed.
An 18-year-old with a Latino background murdered 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde on Tuesday.
Arellano, who regularly writes about politics within the Latino community — notably, warning that Latino voters were turning against Democrats last year — wrote of Uvalde:
When I heard that a gunman had killed multiple schoolchildren in a predominantly Latino town in Texas, I immediately thought: white supremacist.
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When I found out that the person who killed 19 fourth-graders and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday was named Salvador Rolando Ramos, my stomach dropped.
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We can’t pretend that the sickness of mass shootings is a whites-only phenomenon fueled mostly by racial hatred. Minorities are supposed to be “better” than that, we tell ourselves. We’re supposed to protect our own from horrors like Uvalde — and yet we can’t.
If there was any silver lining to the horror in Uvalde, Arellano wrote, it was that it showed that Latinos were not “unassimilable” and had fully integrated into the United States, including into its unfortunate phenomenon of mass shootings.
Arellano recently attacked Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva, claiming that he exemplifies the “worst” Latino “traits.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.